I have an uncle who is running about 8-10 rigs around Fort Worth. He's in his late seventies and refused to retire. He says this is the biggest boom he's seen in his 50 years in the business. He is quite excited about the "Barnett-Shale play" that's going on and says he can't wait to get to work every day.
With restricitons down to and below every 50 acres alot of people without mineral rights are losing the beauty of their surface rights to the oil companies. When the water trucks start tearing up the roads cities are going to rethink the decision. JMO
I noticed a lot of new drill rigs last spring when I went through Colorado, too. I know Union 76 drilled a slew of test wells here on the Cumberland Plateau back in the '70's, found gas, and capped them off. It's about time for them to start tapping the field here. Thermal needs his royalty check......
I live in Fort Worth. They are buying 3-year driling rights in my neighborhood to put in a well 4 blocks from my house.
I wonder if the France family and Bruton Smith are in on this?
which means.....oil is a renewable resource.
The Barnett Shale is a "Zone," a layer underground. You've got layers and layers of zones that stack on top of each other all the way to the surface.
Decades ago the Barnett Shale was called the "Pregnant Shale" because everyone knew that it had oil/gas, but no one knew how to make it produce.
George Mitchell spent a small fortune and years of his life to figure out how to frac a Barnett Shale well to make the pregnant shale finally produce oil/gas.
Once word got out that he did it, the wildcatters started leasing and drilling in just about every geographical area that had a Barnett Shale zone below it...with each one trying to duplicate Mitchell's proprietary frac'ing technique.
Some got it right, others haven't. But it's an intriguing situation as the well log data is so good now that everyone knows if their well will drill into the Barnett Shale or not, but that doesn't guarantee a producing well...only the right frac job does that.
More intriguing is that old wells that drilled **below** the Barnett Shale decades ago may now be able to be re-frac'ed in order to finally produce their piece of the pregnant shale.
So the article from the NY Times is leaving out a major portion of the story: not only are a lot of new wells being drilled, but *old* wells in deeper zones may now be reworked to produce at the Barnett Shale level.
